Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Gaza and the Antidote to all that Bad News

My wife’s
antidote to constant news bombardment about airplanes blown out of the sky over
Ukraine
and the conflict with HAMAS is an episode of “Everybody loves Raymond” followed
by back to back episodes of “Frazier”. I
appreciate it sounds superficial but in a 24-hour a day news environment the
twin news items I referred to at the beginning are pounced on by partisan
journalists and international news agencies to fill the airwaves with
speculation, misinformation, trite analyses meant for the soporifically
inclined mind and propaganda. It could easily continue for weeks until
something else replaces it (see how the airwaves were saturated with rumor,
conjecture and excited gossip after Malaysia Airlines flight MH370
disappeared).It isn’t too difficult to
turn off the news completely, if that is what you want.We do not need
to be spoon-fed the news, 24/7.But the
issue is that unless you are utterly self-absorbed, constant media bombardment
will have an impact, even, if only tangentially, on how you view events.

In Israel during
times of increased conflict and war there is community and solidarity. Here in
the UK,
as in most of the developed world, there is no war and conflicts are viewed as entirely
political.Everything is viewed through
a prism that is back lit by money and what can be achieved by spreading vast
amounts of it around.It is of course an
obscene and unethical philosophy that feeds this thinking. Perhaps it is the
source of the West’s infirmity. In parts
of our world that are labeled “developed” most nations have suffered centuries
of needless, often fratricidal, blood soaked conflict.There is little mood for understanding or
acknowledging complexity.

Jon Snow (principal news reader at Britain’s
Channel 4 News) is pro-Palestinian and anti-Israel. Curiously, his bio on
Wikipedia fails to mention his connection to MAP (Medical Aid for Palestine).Nevertheless he expressed
the common frustration shared by too many people when a few days ago he
attacked the Israeli spokesperson by condemning Israel for failing to “speak to
HAMAS”.When you are informally negotiating
with an enemy that has articles of its constitution declaring global
annihilation for not just Israel but for all Jews everywhere issues such as
talking and trust are not quite so simple.

But this
does highlight the simplistic view that most people have of the war and its
antecedents, even if Jon Snow is guilty of dissimulation and journalistic cant.

Conflict
as an existential struggle is for the fanatic fringe that increasingly
dominates street protests and campuses, and for philosophers teaching in our
universities whose pathway to fame is linked to creating new, muscular disciplines
around identity politics.But for most
of us, any conflict for survival is “so last century”.

Except it
isn’t.The fall of the Soviet
Union left many on the far-left adrift and the Palestinian cause
reunited them. There exists across most of the globe an intensifying communion
of hate led by a Muslim-extreme Left coalition
and the danger is that the extreme left will, with
unwavering enthusiasm drift towards the center as society’s discomfort with
acceptable bigotry ceases to be anoxymoron.If passion determines commitment then it is
the fanatic that is most committed to change and the people who are most vocal
and visible in the press, in our universities and through the electronic media
in influencing society.

This
expanding coalition is the hell we face if our Hasbara (information) policy
continues to be a combination of government indifference and ineffective
counter propaganda. The "Jewish World" has been in ideological
turmoil through religious upheaval and mutual sectarian disdain for so long that
it is in danger of rushing blindly into self-imposed oblivion while the threat
from political extremism and ever larger Muslim immigration into the West will
create the conditions by which Nazism could easily return to the mainstream within another decade. The time to mobilize against multiple threats (and not just to the
Western way of life) but also to a flight from most centers of Jewish life outside
of Israel
into a few concentrated ‘safe-areas’ is long past.

Of
course we could always turn off the TV, ditch our cell-phones, stop reading the
news and throw out the laptop but ignorance is not bliss, except to the fool.